Many industry products are moving towards a software model where they are offered as software packages that run on standard platforms including off the shelf Personal Computer (PC) systems and on standard operating systems such as Windows® (available from Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash.) and Linux®. By eliminating or greatly reducing the need for costly proprietary hardware, both the cost of development and deployment of these software products can be greatly reduced. For these systems which must handle large amounts of load, rather than running this load on a small number of very fast, but also very expensive systems, many products are able to distribute load across a large number of inexpensive computer systems.
For server applications software, software updates are typically applied manually to target systems. Multisystem clusters require the administrator to physically log into each system, manually load the software via Computer Disk (CD) or network share, and then execute the software update process.
Several products exist today with the end goal of keeping software up to date. One of the more commonly used products is Windows Update® available from Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash. Users can use this tool to keep their Windows-based operating system up to date with the latest patches and security fixes. Software updates through Windows Update are pulled from a centralized server provided by Microsoft. Although Microsoft is able to control which users may download new content, they are unable to push content to specific computer systems in a particular order since the upgrade request is initiated from each target system rather than a centralized manager. Other conventional products aim to solve similar problems by providing framework software that companies can use to allow software updates to be securely retrieved from a centralized server.
Another product which exists in the marketplace that is similar to the install agent is developed by IBM of Armonk, N.Y. One of the components of IBM's Express Runtime® is its IBM installation agent. This software resides both on the target systems and also a centralized manager and allows for more discrete and controllable upgrades of IBM-based middleware from a central manager.